The "on-demand" audio and video files linked to the reading schedule for this course (all marked with the "visible word" icon) can be viewed using a RealPlayer. To download a free RealPlayer, click here.

Thurs, Sept 4 - introduction to the course

• a short guide to position papers, including a very basic video presentation

Tues Sept 9 - what the modernists abhorred...

• audio: Al Filreis on the decline of late Victorian poetry--verse "gone to seed"--with a note on the emergence of imagism ()
• Edwin Markham, excerpts from "Lincoln, the Man of the People"
  
• William Vaughn Moody, excerpt from "Gloucester Moors"
  
• audio: Al Filreis on Moody's poem as an example of late-century poetry "gone to seed"; especially for a poet like William Carlos Williams, the poetic language of this verse, not so much its popular/populist sentiment, fueled the strongly negative reaction among modernists
• William Vaughn Moody, "I Am the Woman"
• Lilith Lorraine, "To the Practical Man"
• Louis Ginsberg, "Waterfalls of Stone"
• Al Filreis briefly comments on "Waterfalls of Stone"

  Jean Millet, The Man with the Hoe Among the two of three most widely read--or at least widely distributed--American poems of the nineteenth century was Edwin Markham's populist-progressive work "The Man with the Hoe" where the common laborer is idealized: O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?

  ...and a hint at what's ahead

• Catherine French, "Alphabet" (1992)
• Nick Piombino, "Who Owns the Words" (2005) (audio: mp3)
• Cathleen Calbert, "Listening to My Mother in the Alzheimer's Wing" (2001)
• Adrienne Rich, "Wait" (2003)
• Christian Bok, chapter "e" from Eunoia (2001)
• Christian Bok, reading from chapter "e" of Eunoia (mp3)